charli xcx has made an album about surviving her own myth: music, fashion, film reviewed

alternate cover art for music, fashion, film. from left to right: musician john cale, fashion designer marc jacobs, charli xcx, and filmmaker martin scorcese.

charli xcx has spent the better part of her career making pop music that never quite fit the mold of the mainstream, even as she edged closer and closer to it, until eventually she simply was the mainstream. on music, fashion, film, she sounds far less interested in recreating that moment than picking apart what it costs to survive one. if brat was the sound of becoming a cultural icon in real time, this album is more interested in what happens after the culture stops moving quite so fast.

released on july 24, 2026 via atlantic, it runs eleven tracks at just over thirty minutes, made with her longtime collaborators A.G. Cook and Finn Keane. it’s short, scratchy, frequently funny, and much sadder than its runtime suggests.

a rock album that refuses to be called one

“rock music” makes the shift obvious within seconds. i can see what people disliked about this song when it was released as the main single in may. it’s kitschy in a way that not a lot of people have an ear for, and it opens the record by announcing that the dancefloor is dead, which is a fairly pointed thing to say two years after you owned the summer. the guitars are a large part of why the album works for me, though. charli is borrowing the vocabulary of rock without pretending she has abandoned pop, which suits an artist who told Rolling Stone she has never thought about genre “in a binary way.”

“ss26” is where the cultural commentary gets especially sharp. there’s something very contemporary about charli documenting the performance of being famous but publicly self-aware. she sings of having written, “a really good notes app apology,” for something she may or may not have done, and the line is so on the nose it reads like a primary source for the late 2010s and early 2020s. surely this one goes in the history books.

shopping for a whole new personality

that fixation on internet-era celebrity continues through “card declined,” with a sound that’s sultry, sardonic, and quietly devastating: a shopping spree in which she tries to buy a personality alongside a handbag. she name-checks the mah jong sofa, a modular roche bobois design whose quilted, mismatched sections can be pulled apart and rebuilt at will, which is a weirdly perfect object for a record about assembling a self out of borrowed references. and i love the interlude, which really shows how charli is keeping her pop sensibility in tact.

“camera” turns the surveillance anxiety back on the people doing the watching. the joke is that charli has spent years voluntarily turning herself into content, and here she hands the media’s version of her straight back to them. the accompanying video sharpens the point rather neatly: she directed it herself and cast vincent cassel as her leading man, which puts her behind the camera in a song about being in front of one.

the trap of following yourself

“2007” treats music itself as a kind of salvation while turning over the parts of fame that still redeem it. “i’m afraid” pushes that same anxiety into her marriage, examining responsibility, obligation, and parasocial influences. the latter feels particularly relevant to a generation raised alongside influencers, fandom accounts, and one-sided relationships with celebrities who can feel strangely accessible because we watch them talk directly into their phones every day. in a way, charli is implicating herself on this track by wondering whether pain has actually made her a better artist or whether that is simply a story she tells herself to justify behaving badly—and it lands.

“yeah” is my favorite track off the album. charli seems to ask herself if she’s following brat too closely—if she’s riding off the success of it. and maybe she is, but that feels like the wrong question. pop stars are constantly expected to repeat whatever made them culturally relevant, while also being punished for doing exactly that. charli seems aware of the trap and mostly decides to have fun inside it.

then there’s “wink wink.” YES. YES. YES. this song sounds like charli embracing adulthood and maturity without performing the sanitized version of those things that pop culture usually asks women to embody. she can grow up without becoming palatable, and i love her for it.

what’s underneath the persona

by “persona,” charli is basically interrogating the construction of the celebrity self. “don’t fucking choke on your ego” is simply a brilliant line in all this, because the song’s narcissism isn’t just about vanity. it’s about covering up insecurities and suffering, which makes the album’s larger preoccupation with the self feel less like a branding exercise and more like an anxiety about whether there’s anything behind the mask at all.

charli’s tenderheartedness is showing

“magic metal montana” is quieter than everything around it, but arguably more affecting. it’s a portrait of A.G. Cook, the producer charli has worked alongside for more than a decade, built from small specifics: his taste for old things, the fact that neither of them has siblings, the flat admission that she would cry if he died. platonic love, dependency, and mortality sit together and are never tidied up. in a pop landscape that treats friendship as branding and collaboration as content, there’s something valuable about intimacy that’s allowed to stay complicated rather than instantly inspirational.

cronenberg, and the strange comfort of oblivion

“no one lasts forever” closes the record and carries its only credited guest: david cronenberg, the director of Crash and The Fly, who delivers a spoken-word passage across the second half of the track. charli has said she recorded an hour of conversation with him in toronto and kept the parts that fitted the song. what survives is a calm, unsentimental argument that art outliving its maker is no consolation to the maker, because the maker is gone. set against six minutes about being watched, misread, and eventually forgotten, it is hauntingly beautiful, and it pushes her thinking about art and identity further than she could have taken it alone.

it also sounds a lot like acceptance. after an album that became a meme, a political aesthetic, and a personality type, charli has to reckon with the possibility that her largest cultural moment is now a permanent part of the public’s idea of her. nothing here is trying to top brat, and that turns out to be the point.

the verdict

the album’s broader themes are selfhood, materialism, anxiety, ambition, and risk, which is more or less the entire emotional vocabulary of growing up in the 21st century. music, fashion, film understands that contemporary celebrity is no longer something that happens exclusively on a stage or screen, and that understanding is a good part of why charli remains relevant.

i’m not a die-hard fan of charli. i have not loved most of her work, brat included, but this one has sent me back to her discography anyway, largely because of what she has done sonically with those guitars.

and maybe that’s the album’s biggest flex. charli doesn’t need to recreate brat to prove she still has something to say. she just needs to keep interrogating what happens when the internet decides who you are, and then refuses to let you become anyone else.

Edited by Kayla Greer